Self-Preservation
Blair Sandburg sat on the bench with his hands between his knees and head bent down, trying to breathe steadily but not deeply. He hated the smells of the morgue. Formaldehyde, bleach, rot, death—he shied away from listing them and reminded himself this was a place of science. The vaulted rooms and old-fashioned laboratories were designed for pathologists to reduce death to cause and effect with their cutters, saws and microscopes. The odors were part of the natural process after bodies succumbed to illness, accident, fire, drowning and accidents. Blair himself would probably end up on an autopsy table one day, if not here then over at the hospital, or in a city far from Cascade. Better to die in a remote mountain pass or under an avalanche of arctic snow. He didn't want his body slit open under fluorescent lights. He didn't want scientists to weigh his lungs on a scale, or tunnel through his skull to poke at the remains of his brain—
"Come on, Sandburg," Jim Ellison called from down the hall. "Let's go eat."
Beside Jim, Henri Brown asked, "Chinese? Mexican? I'm starving."
Blair scooped up his belongings and hurried after the two Cascade police detectives. His sneakers made squeaking sounds on the green tile. Henri pushed open the exit and the morgue's oppressive aromas were suddenly dissipated by a cold, wet wind carrying in the full rawness of the November day.
"You okay?" Jim asked, taking the backpack so Blair could shrug into his jacket. Beneath his raincoat, Jim still wore the black suit he had donned for a court appearance that morning. Blair looked down at his worn jeans and decided that he looked like a schlump by comparison.
"Yeah, you know me, man. I just love this place."
Jim's firm hand guided Blair out the door and under the shelter of Henri's umbrella. The parking lot was a maze of potholes and double-parked official vehicles. The wind that cut through Blair's jacket raised goosebumps up and down his arms and back, but neither Jim nor Henri seemed bothered by the cold.
"Did you find anything?" Blair asked. The dead woman who had been pulled out of the bay was Henri and Rafe's case to solve, but Rafe was out sick and Henri had asked Jim to take a look at the corpse just in case. Just in case had become a secret password in the Major Crime bullpen, a coded acknowledgment that sometimes Jim Ellison could pick up on tiny clues that no one else could.
"Blood and glitter under her fingernails," Jim said.
"Arts-and-crafts kind of glitter or body glitter?" Blair asked.
Henri fished for the keys to the police sedan they'd signed out. "What's the difference?"
"Body glitter is usually finer." The car smelled like worn leather, old cigarette smoke and spilled coffee, but Blair was happy to slide into the back and get out of the wind and rain. He crossed his arms and shoved his hands under his armpits. "Usually has a fragrance, and the glue is different."
"I'm not going to ask how you know that," Jim said from the front passenger seat.
"I know. You wear that stuff, don't you, Sandburg?" Henri asked. "Silver, gold, what's your preference?"
Blair kept a straight face. "Purple above the waist, blue below it."
Jim laughed. Henri gave him a suspicious look. Blair gazed out his window at the falling rain, ever so glad to be away from all those dead bodies. The whole process of death and burial had become over-complicated and over-commercialized in America. He had read that coffins were marked up three or four hundred percent over their actual cost by the funeral industry. Blair had medical insurance but no life insurance. If he died, Jim would have to pay for the whole shindig, a terrible cost to pawn off on his partner.
"Ever think about being cremated?" he asked. He realized the question might seem a non-sequitor to both Jim and Henri, so he hastened to add, "I was just thinking, all those bodies in the morgue, two thousand bucks each for coffins- that's a lot of money."
Henri eased the car into traffic. "Two thousand? Try doubling that. My uncle picked himself out a nice one for four grand the month before he died. Imperial white velvet on the inside, solid bronze on the outside, ebony and gold pinstripe all around. Of course, the man weighed three hundred pounds. He needed the supersize."
"Oversize," Jim said. "Supersize is what you get at Burger King."
"I want to be cremated," Henri said. "Except what if you're not really dead when they put you in there? Burning up would hurt like hell."
"You'd rather be buried alive?" Blair asked. "Entombed six feet below the ground in total darkness with the air running out?"
Jim put up a hand. "Enough of the cheery conversation, okay? You're dead before they bury or cremate you. It's a given."
Blair tried to imagine his corpse in a coffin buried underground for hundreds of years. It seemed like an incredible waste of land resources. Land given over to cemeteries might be better used as parks, farms or low-income housing. Better to be ashes, then, and have those ashes scattered to the wind or sea or the lush ground of a fertile valley. As long as he didn't imagine an autopsy as part of the process, he could be happy with that ultimate disposition of his worldly body.
For lunch they stopped at Joey's Deli, a popular spot for cops and other city workers. Blair didn't think he was hungry until they sat down, but hot roast beef with mustard on rye went a long way toward making him feel better. Henri ate an entire steak bomb and Jim had meatloaf with gravy and mashed potatoes. Bullpen gossip and talk about basketball kept Henri and Jim talking for twenty minutes straight while Blair considered prepaying for a coffin now to save Jim or someone else the money later. The deli grew crowded and a little too warm, and he sucked down a cold lemonade to make the temperature more bearable.
"Be right back," Henri said, off to use the restroom.
Jim unknotted his tie further. "You still squeamish about the floater?"
Floater was police slang for a drowning victim. "No, I'm good."
"You don't have to come along on these things. They're not for everyone."
"You might need me." Blair shrugged, glad for the loud conversations surrounding them. "I should get used to them."
One of Jim's eyebrows quirked up a little. "Why? They're not part of your chosen occupation, Chief. They're just part of mine."
But Jim had become Blair's occupation, or at least a full-time hobby. Looking back over the two years since they had met, Blair was hard-pressed to identify exactly when and where he had started putting Jim and police work first, but there was no arguing with the fact that he hadn't finished his dissertation, was behind in his graduate seminars and had a backpack full of Anthro 101 papers that had to be graded within the next two days.
"You, me, police work, this other stuff, my studies, there's no dividing line," Blair said, waving his hands for emphasis. He could see by the narrowing of Jim's eyes that his partner didn't like that response. Blair hastened to add, "It's all fluid, Jim, you know—dynamic boundaries, give and take, a balancing act."
Jim frowned. "You give, I take. I can't help you teach classes or grade papers or write your thesis."
"You help," Blair insisted. He didn't like where the conversation was heading. "Everything I learn from you and the guys, I can put to use some other way."
Jim's expression gave away what he thought of that line of bull, but Blair wasn't exaggerating as much his partner might think. He had learned an enormous amount about the justice system, for instance, and that was useful to just about anyone. The tribal behavior of the police force had given him concrete, modern examples by which to draw analogies to other cultures. He had friends he'd never expected to make, and he and Jim had saved lives, helped victims and put away dangerous criminals. Even if Jim had proven not to be a Sentinel, even if none of it had a single thing to do with his academic research, Blair would still have benefited from working alongside him.
"Give me one example," Jim said.
Blair wasn't about to get all maudlin in the middle of a deli. "Well, for example, I know beyond any reasonable doubt that I never want to work in a morgue."
Jim rolled his eyes, but the skepticism disappeared and Blair took pride in diverting his partner. Henri returned from the bathroom and the three men went back to the precinct under darkening skies and high winds. Blair didn't think about autopsies for the rest of the afternoon, although that night he dreamed of Henri's floater and his first glimpse of her— mottled skin, mouth open, hair like seaweed down to her waist. In the dream he apologized to her for the impersonal way in which the dead were treated in America. She said nothing to him in return, which was just as well.
A week later, he was still thinking about death. Not every moment, but at least once a day. He would be lecturing to a hundred undergrads in Sayer Hall, trying to talk over the hiss of the ancient heating system, and the knowledge would sweep over him that one day his voice would be forever stilled. Vocal chords in a pathologist's hand looked like what, exactly? Lasagna? A hair pick? Anatomy had never been his strong point. The next day he stopped typing an email to examine his fingers, which in death would swell and turn dusky, then shrivel until the skin rotted away and only bone remained. In the supermarket he held up a cantaloupe and wondered how many tons of biological material had been consumed and processed by the entity called Blair Sandburg. He must have stood there for a long time, because the next thing he knew, Jim was plucking the cantaloupe from his hand.
''It's just a fruit, Chief," Jim said.
One night, while waiting for Jim to come home with take-out Chinese, Blair stretched out on the sofa and leafed through the phone directory. Some of the ads for funeral services were geared for the city's Chinese and Asian populations—"all customs fully observed." Others had Stars of David or a symbol that apparently denoted all faiths. Most listed single-payment, multi-payment or pre-payment options, and all took major credit cards. He flipped to the cremation pages, which were by virtue of alphabetical order right next to the pages for cruise ships. Blair wondered if anyone ever combined the two services— incinerate Uncle Fred, then take the urn on a nice trip down to Baja Mexico.
He heard Jim at the door and leapt up to help him with the bags. Of course it was still raining—it had been raining in Cascade since at least the Mesozoic Age—and Jim looked soaked and disgruntled.
"Bad day?" Blair asked, wondering if Jim's senses had perhaps spiked because of the weather.
"No," Jim said. "They were out of moo shu pork."
Blair got the bags to the counter and began unpacking the food, which smelled delicious. Jim hung up his coat, put his shoes in the closet and headed upstairs to change into dry clothes. Blair set the table and got beer from the refrigerator and forgot entirely about the phone book, which Jim saw lying open when he came down again. Of course he didn't have to actually pick up the book in order to be able to read it from a distance.
"Thinking of taking a cruise?" Jim asked.
"Yeah, in all my copious spare time. Come eat."
Jim looked at the ads for a long moment. Blair cursed himself for carelessness. Although he'd come a long way, Jim could still be compulsive about organizing, cleaning up, putting things in his place. Leaving an open phone book in the middle of the coffee table was tantamount to leaving fingerprints on the refrigerator door or pulling the shades down in an uneven fashion.
"Jim, the fried rice is getting cold."
Jim put the phone book back where it belonged and came to eat his dinner. His silence unnerved Blair, who put the plates on the table and asked, "How was work? Anyone pick up that suspect on the Donnelly arson case?"
"Work was fine" Jim gazed at Blair squarely. "Anything bothering you lately?"
"Now that you mention it, yes." Blair dug his fork into some moo goo gai pan. "They're resurfacing one of the staff parking lots. Do you know how hard it is to find a space as it is? Now we've got to trek down the hill to auxiliary parking near the football field—"
"I don't care about parking lots, Chief."
"I care," Blair said, managing to sound indignant.
"I'm not going to die."
Blair took a bite and chewed twenty times, just like his mother had always urged him to do.
"The police chaplain's office called today," Jim said. "They said you were looking for information about funeral services."
"Just some research."
"You could have called the university chaplain for that," Jim said. "Look, don't get me wrong. We both know how dangerous being a cop is. But if I die, everything's taken care of. You won't have to make any choices about burial or plots–my lawyer will make all the arrangements, and Simon has a copy of my will."
Blair pushed the food around on his plate. "Okay. That's good to know."
They ate in silence for a few more minutes before Jim asked, "It's not me, is it?"
"Hmm?"
"You're thinking about your own plans." Jim's face darkened with realization and disappointment that he hadn't guessed correctly the first time. "I know we've had some close scrapes, but you're not going to die."
"Cremate me," Blair said. "Tell Naomi to scatter me in the best place she can think of. I'm sorry I can't give you the money up front, but you can sell off my stuff to cover the bill."
"I'm not worried about the money."
"You should be. Flowers, newspaper announcement, wake—Jim, these things add up. "
"Can we not talk about this? You're not going to die and if you do, money's going to be the last thing I care
about. "Blair hadn't expected Jim to sound so angry. Then again, people were always dying on Jim. His mother. His fellow soldiers. Partners, fellow cops, friends. Blair regretted that he would one day add to that list.
"One last thing," Blair said. "Just hear me out, okay? Whatever happens, however I go, I don't want an autopsy. Absolutely no autopsy. I don't care if the conditions are suspicious, I don't care if I die in some medically exciting way. No autopsy. Promise me."
Jim pushed his plate away, half the food untouched. In the warm light of the loft he looked as sad as Blair felt. "Chief—"
"No autopsy," Blair insisted. "If you let them do that, I'll come back and haunt you in really annoying ways. I'll hide your car keys, and rearrange all your socks, and make moaning noises when you have some girl over."
Jim squeezed the bridge of his nose. "All right. No autopsy."
The promise should have eased his mind, but it didn't. Blair decided the least he could do was write his own obituary. He called the Cascade Times, got a quote and figured he could afford about seventy-five words for three days. The thought of reducing his life to just seventy-five words was depressing, but then he took the word limit as a challenge and strived to create something insightful, direct and memorable. He finished it one morning in the bullpen while Jim was in a meeting and saved it with a password, but then fretted that Jim might never be able to open it. He'd have to remember to tell it to Jim with his last dying breath.
"Want one?" Henri asked, holding out a box of sugary white donuts.
"Those things will kill you," Rafe said.
"If you had to go," Blair asked, "how would you go? Illness, accident, in your sleep?"
Rafe didn't hesitate in the least. "In bed, but definitely not sleeping."
"In flagrante seducto?" Henri snorted. "Might be a little embarrassing when the paramedics show up."
"I've got nothing to be embarrassed about," Rafe said with a grin.
Henri reached for a stack of folders. "I'd rather be ninety years old and watching a good football game."
"And that is the difference between you and me, partner," Rafe said. "What about you, Sandburg?"
Blair stopped chewing on the end of a pencil. "For a good cause. While I'm doing something for someone else, maybe. Karmic duty."
He wouldn't say it, didn't dare breathe it aloud, but Blair had decided it would be okay to die if dying meant saving someone he loved. He might throw himself in front of a bullet for Jim, or push Naomi away from an oncoming car. The worst he could imagine was a long, lingering illness, wasting away on a hospital bed while his muscles withered and bedsores grew on his skin. Becoming infirm, helpless and pain-ridden over the course of months or years would be a living hell, although still not as bad as the thought of his body ripped open for a pathologist's investigation.
Jim came back from his meeting with stack of notes and deep worry line between his eyes. "Something's wrong in the building," he told Blair after pulling him into Simon's office. "I can hear it."
Blair sat his partner down on the sofa. "Okay, so let's track it down."
An hour later they identified the problem as a broken valve and high-pressure steam escaping in a locked boiler room in the basement. The pitch of the steam was like a bee in Jim's ear, and so Blair convinced Simon to excuse them while repairs were made. They went over to the University, which was quiet and gloomy under the steady fall of rain. Blair's office was stifling hot, and he flung open the window to let in some cold air. Jim eyed the folders, books and papers piled in every conceivable nook of Blair's office.
"You want some help tidying this up?" Jim asked.
"Piling is a recognized organizational method, you know. You're the only one who doesn't respect that." Blair handed him an armload of books. "Make yourself happy. They go on that bookcase over there."
Jim not only reshelved the books, but started putting them into alphabetical order as well. Blair smiled to himself and let him have his fun. He put on some music from the Peruvian Andes, strings and flute and drums, and set to work clearing his desk. He didn't want Jim to see the funeral brochures he'd been collecting and managed to shove them into a drawer before his partner turned around with a frown.
"Don't you have a feather duster or something? Rags? Cleaning spray?"
"Jim, relax. Here, read this article I dug up about the Chopec."
Jim stretched out in the chair students used when they came to see Blair. The students weren't quite as bold as to put their feet up, though. Soon he was engrossed in the article and Blair was grading his way through the long overdue Anthro 101 papers. The music continued to play, and the rain continued to fall, and in the warm coziness of the office Blair was able to banish most thoughts of dying.
Two days later, though, while running at full speed along the waterfront, Blair knew exactly how and when he was going to cross into the promised light of the afterlife. His heart was going to explode in a mass of blood and blown valves in just about sixty seconds, the result of sprinting at top speed after Rafe and Henri's suspect in the floater case. Jim had the lead, Henri was sometime behind Blair, and Rafe was swinging around in the car with lights flashing and sirens full blast. The rain had stopped but the pier was slick, which in no way slowed down the six-foot tall redhead who had once been the victim's roommate.
Blair considered himself to be in reasonably good shape, but he was no marathon runner. He almost admitted defeat and dropped out of the chase, but stubbornness kept him going until Jim tackled the woman onto a grassy patch where neighboring condominium owners no doubt walked their dogs. The woman kicked and screamed and gouged Jim's face. Blair caught up to them and grabbed for the woman's hands, only to feel his feet slip on the wet grass. He went down flat on his back and heard a crack like thunder.
Jesus, that hurt. His head rang with the pain of impact. His back tingled like it was on fire. Only dimly aware of the woman still screaming and Jim shouting for her to shut up, he pulled himself up in a world that spun sickeningly and darkened at the edges.
"Henri, cuff her!" Jim was shouting, and Blair blinked as Henri's fuzzy shape joined them. Rafe was a moment behind him, the sirens and lights ratcheting up the pain in Blair's head. It took all three detectives to subdue the suspect, who had attracted quite a number of gawkers despite the gloomy weather. Blair could do nothing but watch and fight the need to faint.
"Sandburg, you okay?" Jim asked, crouching beside him when the melee had ended. "You're bleeding."
"I am?" Blair touched the back of his head and saw red streaking his fingers.
Jim turned to tell Rafe to call an ambulance. Nausea rolled through Blair's stomach and he felt bile at the back of his throat. Skull fracture, internal bleeding, hematomas, coma, death—he knew the terrible news, he had watched E.R. for years. Instead of feeling calm and justified in his planning, he began to shake. The renewed rain mixed with the salty breeze off the bay and brought tears to his eyes.
"No autopsy," he said as he grabbed the edges of Jim's jacket. His heart thumped against his ribs and his lungs burned. "Remember, you promised."
"No autopsy. I remember." Jim wadded something against the side of Blair's head and held it there. The pressure felt far away and of no consequence. "Talk to me, Chief. What day is it?"
"Don't let them cut me open, man. I don't want to be cut open. Cremation, okay? Card in my wallet. And I wrote the notice." Blair had more to tell him, much more, words and sentiments that should have been expressed long before now, but he'd procrastinated too long. "It's on your computer."
"Shut up about that stuff." Jim scowled at him in the growing darkness. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
"The password is 'Burton,'" Blair whispered. His spine couldn't support his weight any more and he saw no use in prolonging the inevitable. Despite Jim urging him otherwise, he sank down to the cool grass and closed his eyes against pain, uncertainty and sorrow. He had nothing to worry about anymore.
***
"Chief," Jim said, helping him to the chair, "we've got to talk about this obsession of yours."
Blair pulled the hospital gown over his knees and eased himself back. The backache persisted, but dizziness stayed at bay as long as he moved carefully. Sitting by the window was preferable to lying in the bed, and if the doctor saw him up and about he might be inclined to release Blair all the sooner. But the chair offered no strategic retreat from Jim, who dropped a blanket on Blair's lap and then sat down across from him with a somber expression on his face.
"I don't know what you mean." Blair turned his head toward the afternoon news on the overhead TV. "I'm not obsessed."
"In the ambulance you wouldn't shut up about what you wanted for your wake," Jim replied. "You told me who you wanted invited, what music to play and what clothes you should be wearing. I found a pre-payment plan for Mallory's Funeral Service in your backpack and your obituary on my computer."
"You found it?"
"You gave me the password."
"I did not." He didn't remember much about the waterfront chase. "Did I really?"
"The guys thought it was really well-written."
Blair groaned.
Undeterred, Jim said, "Maybe you should talk to a doctor. The campus clinic has one, right?"
For a moment he wondered if it was Jim who had the concussion, because the hospital was full of all kinds of doctors that Blair could talk to, including the doctor who had admitted him and the one who had consulted on his sprained back and the one who had told him his head was not full of broken egg yolk. Then he realized Jim meant a psychiatrist, and Blair wished he could sink right through the floor, away from Jim's concern.
"It's not natural." Jim said. "It's been going on for weeks, this thing about death and dying."
Blair covered his face with both hands. "I'm just being proactive. I don't want to saddle you with any debts or questions when I'm gone."
"We talked about that," Jim said, and then he sighed. After a moment he said, "Maybe this thing isn't about death, after all. Maybe you're worried about something else."
"I don't know what you mean."
"What's that window thing? You told Simon about it. Joe Hardy's window?""Johari's Window," Blair said.
"Sometimes people around you know something about you that you yourself don't. Your personal blind spot."
"And here I thought you never listen."
"Maybe this whole preoccupation with death is just a symptom of something else you're worried about. School, work, the whole Sentinel thing—I don't know, I'm not the shrink, I just think it's worth asking the question."
Blair put his hands down. Jim's theory wasn't as outlandish as Blair wanted it to be. Maybe the whole death and dying thing had been a diversion against the very worries that Jim suggested. Since it had begun, he'd had little time or energy to concentrate on the more concrete and immediate pressures of his life.
"A defense mechanism," Blair murmured. "Kind of makes sense, I guess."
"When you get out of here, we'll get you a will. Something clean and simple, all your wishes rolled up in a nice legal package."
Blair rubbed an itchy spot above his ear. "I don't know if that's a good idea."
Jim gave him a quizzical look.
"I might change my mind," Blair said. "Maybe today I want something nice and non-denominational, but things change. I could become devoutly Jewish. You can't cremate a devout Jew. Or maybe I'll want you to do the Homa Fire Ritual. That's for Hindus. You can't ask me to lock myself into something."
Jim rubbed his eyes. "Sandburg, the doctor was obviously wrong. You've got some serious brain damage."
"Speak for yourself, man." Blair tried to remember if he had any references on Hindu funeral rites. Maybe Jim could pick up some light reading for him while he recuperated. Or maybe Jim was right, and he should just talk to a psychiatrist before his thoughts spiraled back down to that dismal place where they'd been residing for so many weeks. "Hey, Jim?"
"Yes?"
"Did you really let the guys read my obituary?"
"Read it?" Jim said. "Last time I saw it, Henri was putting it on the bulletin board. I think the part about 'exceptionally active social life' was underlined and highlighted."
"It's possible to die of humiliation, you know," Blair complained.
Jim patted his arm in a comforting fashion. "Don’t worry, Chief. You're not going anywhere without me."
The End
Author's Notes: Thank you to Terry Odell and Terry Berube for their helpful assistance! And remaining typos or mistakes are obviously my own fault. Feedback of all shapes and colors welcomed.